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In honor of the recently desecrated Guardians of Nimrud, we repost this classic piece on the importance, not to mention the fun, of museums. Thanks to them, the Guardians are still with us. Read on, and keep reading, to go with them through the Gates and down the garden path, in unexpected company.

Alexander the Great died in 323 BC. He was 33. Alexander died of a bone infection from an old arrow wound. It’s possible that his immune system was compromised by his grief, bordering on dementia, over the death of Hephaestion, his closest friend, greatest general, second in command and, some say, the love of his life.

Hephaestion

Like the god he believed himself to be, the Golden Conqueror would never age. He won the respect and admiration of his own time and successive generations. In awe and affection they continue to laud him, creating imagery in all media from marble to film.

His actual body was mummified in Alexandria, Egypt, by Egyptian necromancers, and was still in a good state of preservation three centuries after his death, when Caesar Augustus leaned into its glass sarcophagus to kiss the Conqueror and, slipping, broke off the mummy’s nose. But Alexander’s tomb and body disappeared. The Alexander Sarcophagus in Istanbul’s Archeological Museum is the nearest thing we have.

Alexander is still fighting and hunting lions on this museum centerpiece from the great Necropolis at Sidon. The stunning bas-relief was created by unknown talent during Alexander’s lifetime. It’s possible that the artist actually set eyes on him.

The art commemorates victory over the Persians at the Battle of Issus in what is now Turkey, and Hephaestion is there fighting as well. Scholars argue over who was buried in the tomb, but he may have commissioned the work before his death with an eye toward Alexandrian help in future battles. The Alexander Sarcophagus was discovered, in what is now Lebanon, in 1887 and brought to Istanbul by Osman Hamdi Bey, the great Ottoman statesman, archeologist and artist who built Istanbul’s Archeological Museum.

And here is the rock star himself, Alexander. This still has traces of yellow paint in the marble hair, rose on the lips. It’s one of several done in the second century BC, when the artist might have had Alexander’s mummy to work from. I find this plausible because the forehead wrinkles are realistic for Alexander but idealized out of many statues.

THE GORDION KNOT

In the drawing up top, Alexander rubs shoulders with an ancient Cypriot statue of Bes, the God of Plenty, a Hittite lion 5500 years old, and King Midas. A skeletal cohort of Midas– nobody knows who it is- rests upstairs among swanky grave goods built of boxwood from 740 BC. Midas was King of the Phrygians, whose capitol of Gordion is near Turkey’s capitol, Ankara. The Phrygians invented a smelting technique that made bronze shine like gold, so yes, everything Midas touched turned to gold. And I thought it was just a fairy tale. Here’s some Midas Gold in the Archeological Museum in Antalya. It actually looks like titanium. There’s also a Madonna whose breasts weep blood, three jolly bronze creatures and a festive phallic bronze pin. I love drawing in museums. The stuff in those cases is laughing at you.

Gordion is the Home of the Gordion Knot. More fairy tales: Nobody could untie the Gordion Knot. Alexander famously solved this dilemma. He pulled out his sword and cut it.

Alexander Cuts the Gordion Knot by Jean-Simon Barthelemy (1743-1811)

A rendition of the Gordion Knot.

Turkey is a veritable Gordion Knot of history. The threads keep weaving in and out, disappearing and reappearing, and I will never ever live long enough to unravel it. In a beloved tale, King MIdas judged Pan the winner in a music contest with Apollo, and a furiously un-godlike Apollo gave him donkey’s ears. The little figures below are Midas Gold and smaller than my hand. I haven’t yet been to the museum in Ankara, now in restoration, but look forward to its re-opening, when I can see Midas’s magnificent wooden furniture preserved and reassembled over years by dedicated archeologists.

LIONS CAN LIVE THOUSANDS OF YEARS That Hittite lion back in Istanbul has fellows all over what is now Turkey. Aslantepe (Lion Hill) Huge dig near Malatya features a jocular fountain lion and many real pussycats.

Here’s a Hittite courtroom, drawn in situ in Turkey in 2004. The culprit sat in the hot seat, surrounded by devils– those paintings on the walls– and was judged by a group. Not much has changed in 5500 years, if you consider the paparazzi.

NIMRUD IN HOLLYWOODThe Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is one of the more civilized museums in the world, allowing artists to carry in sketchbooks and work at any time. But they go farther still. I drew this winged, lion-bodied Assyrian Guardian and mapped his beard curls to render when I wasn’t standing up– on feet that felt like two hot anvils pounding upward. But I neglected to render one curl to go by. I went back next day, but the exhibit was closed. At the guard station I explained the problem while flipping pages in the sketchbook. “All I need is five minutes,” I said, and those enlightened people called the actual curator who personally came downstairs, escorted me up to the exhibit, unlocked it and stood there while I drew the beard curl. Now THAT’s a museum!!

To the right of the bearded Guardian is a piece from a personal puzzle: that male figure with a bird head, wings and a sideways Egyptian stance, symbol of exotica and ancient mystery. This image strides through my earliest memories, associated with Echo Park, with klieg lights across the sky and the smell of eucalyptus, an enduring symbol of Old Hollywood, of Los Angeles, of home. What a shock to discover this dear and familiar figure to be a djinn– a genie, relic of Nimrud, in Mesopotamia, oceans and continents and millennia away from my childhood in California. I was totally immersed in the Middle East, obsessed with moving to Turkey, drawing to learn more. Echo Park had been the furthest thing from my mind. I stood there in the Met with my mouth open while images strobed through my memory. DW Griffith’s silent epic Intolerance, shot in Hollywood in 1916, stunned viewers with its exotic representation of Babylon. See the figures on the gate?

Set of Babylon, DW Griffith’s Intolerance, Hollywood 1916.

Antiquities in the Middle East were being discovered at the same time as the medium of film. DW Griffith’s Babylon featured this same djinn, still parading in Hollywood shopping malls to this day.

Hollywood Highland Center, 2004.

One Ramadan, drawing from memory Eastern Turkish women I’d seen on the tram, I was compelled by a certain strength in their features to intersperse them with Mesopotamian deities. After all, these faces are all from the same region.

Nimrud is on the Tigris, just southeast of the eastern Turkish border. It was originally excavated in the 1850s. One example of our bird-djinn was surely found between then and Intolerance. DW Griffith employed artists from all over the world. One of them knew the image, which was used precisely because of that sense of ancient mystery it conveys. Many more were found at Nimrud in 1931 by archeologist Max Mallowan. The one above, which I used as reference for my djinn drawing, was photographed by his wife, Agatha Christie.

Agatha Christie at Nimrud, c1937.

AGATHA CHRISTIE? That Gordion Knot again! The most prolific and well-known mystery writer of all time was no stranger to Hollywood, since so many movies have been made of her novels, including Murder on the Orient Express which begins in Istanbul, where she often stayed on her way to and from her husband’s digs in Mesopotamia. I had always associated Agatha Christie with floral dresses, trains, lorgnettes, a detective with patent-leather hair. But here she is in the dusty winds of the Middle East. She funded many digs, used up her face-cream cleaning ancient sculpture, and was an inveterate shutter-bug. She photographed many of the considerable Mallowan finds and wound up on many a museum plaque, along with all those best-seller lists.

Turkey is a mystery I will never solve, but it sure is fun trying. One way is to travel, and another way is to go into the museums and draw. When I get fascinated by a piece of art and draw it, I learn more and more about this place. Everyone was here, many at the same time. Check out these strange bedfellows from the 2nd century AD, at the Archeological Museum in Antalya.

There’s Priapus actual size– fist-sized– at right center. He’s in a glass case with a light you press for two minutes of illumination. I kept pushing the button so I could see to draw, and when I looked up a large crowd was standing behind me, staring into the case and giggling.

It turns out that a dragon was a symbol of Christianity. So was a foot, which represented pilgrimage. Drawing in the Met, I realized that Christianity had spread all over the Middle East long before Islam. It incorporated all the fantastic animals of the Shamanistic religions that preceded it.

All the early Christian exhibits are full of these strange co-mingled creatures: bird-headed lions, griffins, dragons, hippogriffs, pigs with wings. By the Middle Ages, artists were using them to populate Hell, most famously Hieronymus Bosch. The ancients combined lions and eagles and bulls. Bosch used animals he saw in Holland: frogs, birds, cats, mice, rabbits. Gradually these conglomerate fiends disappeared from Christian art, and all that is left of them now are those gargoyles on Notre Dame.

Gargoyles, Notre Dame, Paris 2000.

Heaven got the winged deities. The visual depictions of angels evolved from those Shamanistic figures, from fiery six-winged Seraphim to Cupid-inspired cherubs. And this powerful winged male figure: our dear and familiar djinn with a human head: the Archangel.

Not every fabulous museum denizen is in a glass case. Derek here posed on the steps of the Met with all the insouciance of one of the stone lions within, while I was able to delight nine-year-old Faisal by drawing his incipient mustache.

Lord Elgin was the British ambassador to Ottoman Istanbul. Distressed at the rural peoples’ indifference to antiquities, he bought as many as he could afford, bullying an old friend into building an entire wing at The British Museum to house them, and bankrupting himself in the process. This is now a cause of discord between Turkey and England, but in the end the glories are preserved. Many village walls sport chunks of carving along with the rock and brick.

In The British Museum, while drawing these lions from Xanthos, I was surrounded by schoolchildren. In uniforms, with sketchbooks, little Harry Potters all, saying in those lovely accents, “Are you actually drawing those lions? Truly?” Yes, I said, these lions are from Xanthos, a city in Turkey. They were astonished, they were entranced. They had not known that Turkey is the Asia Minor referred to in the museum. My sketchbook at that time had pictures of the British Ambassador to Turkey, our Anglican Canon, the chandeliers in the British Consulate, and Cappadocia.

What these kids loved was the Open Air Museum in Cappadocia. They would not let me turn the pages. They wanted to know the story of every single pigeon cave in the cliffs, every window, every cave church. “These are pigeonholes? Real ones?”

“Look at this, it’s old Father Theodosias’s church, look here, where he prayed, the stone is worn there, that’s Arab painting up top, you can see-” When I looked up, there were a hundred kids there, parents, teachers, docents… now THAT’s a museum!

There are plenty of Hittite lions in Cappadocia, too. All of Turkey is one breathing, palpating, interwoven fist of historical threads, pulling in the whole world. We live at the center, then and now. And what’s all this history for? Well, for starters history gives me hope. In these perilous times it’s reassuring to realize that the ancients, too, often thought– with good reason!–that the world was ending. It’s relaxing, when distressed by the antics of some fruitcake potentate or terrorist thugs, to read of the same a thousand years ago and know that these lethal fools too shall pass. History is humbling: no matter how unique I feel, I learn of legions of others. Wandering through the museums, looking at familiar expressions in ancient bronze and marble and clay, I feel at one with the great tide of humanity: following that Gordion thread, seeing it disappear into the knot, wondering if I will ever see it re-emerge, or if I must wait for another incarnation. One day I may have all the answers, but by then the questions probably won’t matter anymore.

IT’S ALL ALIVE The date of this angel is probably slightly after 1261. That’s when the re-enfranchised Eastern Christians of Constantinople dug up Henri Dandolo and threw him out the window of Hagia Sophia, officially ending the sixty-year Roman Catholic aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. You remember Dandolo, don’t you? The old blind Doge of Venice who told the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople? Buried in Hagia Sophia, center of Eastern Christianity and its foremost temple, which he turned into a cathedral after trashing its entire congregation and their city? That guy. Out the window, his bones gnawed by the dogs. How I love the history here.

This Angel is actually a Seraph, a sexless bodiless representation of Divine Thought. Its re-emergence in 2009, thanks to the Turkish government, colors the whole eastern side of the basilica. It’s the only whole survivor of four, mosaiced into the four pendentives below the dome. A pendentive is that triangular space that allows a dome to join with the square space beneath it. Why not fill the space with angels? Made sense to the Byzantines. Makes sense to me, but then I’ve been living here awhile.

ALL HISTORY MUST INCLUDE A CAT So: fifteen hours drawing this angel from this exact spot: a complete sweep of history. We have the 6th-Century windows around the dome, the post-Latin mosaic Angel, some of Sultan Abdulmecid’s 1841 paint, the Byzantine balustrade, an Ottoman chandelier, and a medallion with Abdulmecid’s tribute in Arabic to family and Allah. All of this in one shot required sitting on a campstool precisely lined up against certain scars on the marble floor, because I have to get up now and then, moving the stool, and the perspective hangs on a hair. Lots of concentration here! As always I muse, while drawing, on the passionate concentration of the original mosaic artists, keeping the grand gesture in such a slow tedious medium. That face up there is over three feet wide.

To break things up a little, I wandered around drawing those graffiti crosses, probably put here by Fourth Crusaders. We talked a lot about them in the post HOT CROSSES: Drawing Crusader Graffiti in Hagia Sophia. I was down on the floor in front of the nave drawing this one hacked into the floor when another sort of angel came over to watch, followed by his parents.

COMING OF AGE If there is an icon of boyhood in Turkey, this is it. Emirhan here is attired for his Sunnet, his circumcision, followed by a party to celebrate his manhood. Every Turkish boy goes through this ceremony, and it bonds them for life. It may or may not take place with an anesthetic, but it will take place. Before the great event the little boy parades around town in as grand a fashion as his parents can afford, often in this costume of a miniature Sultan. Normally I don’t take requests, but when his father asked I just couldn’t resist.

AND HERE’S THE CAT One of Hagia Sophia’s stellar guards with Obama Gul Kitty, who our President petted on National TV while visiting Hagia Sophia back in 2008. Hagia Sophia is popular with American Presidents: here it is in 1999 with the Clintons inside.

Obama Gul lives in Hagia Sophia and like all girl cats has always behaved as a queen, but since her media appearance with the President she is even more fat and smug.

WHIRLIGIGS UNDER HEAVEN

And check out that inlay work above the pillars around the upper alcoves! I always loved whirligigs and so did the Emperor Justinian. St Catherine was one of his patron saints, and we find Catherine Wheels everywhere in Hagia Sophia. Is it mother-of-pearl? With some dark wood or tortoise-shell or black stone, porphyry in the circles…

Justinian and his Empress, Theodora, began building on Hagia Sophia in 532, to replace the previous temple which had been burned in the Nika Rebellion. To create what they hoped would be a glory for heaven, they commissioned Isadore of Miletus, a physicist, and Anthemius of Tralles, an architect and mathematician. Justinian and Theodora’s love was legendary. Like Hagia Sophia, it has outshone all the contemporary criticism, all their probable and all too human flaws. For fifteen hundred years, now, their great temple has stood, a miracle of sensual symmetry, of space and light and beauty. It’s what happens when great physics, architecture and mathematics combine with great love.

So, whatever this whirligig façade is made of, it was made in the 6th Century. It’s recently been cleaned, and what a revelation. It used to look like shallow gray bas-relief. Here’s a drawing from 2004, see? I couldn’t make out the design and had to make do with curlicues.

The roughened surface of the marble balustrades is acturally fifteen centuries of people carving their names. Over time the names fade down into the marble, leaving a scratched, pitted texture I love.

PEELING TROMPE L’OEIL The far right arch in these photos is trompe l’oeil from the Fossati Brothers, Swiss architects hired in 1841 by Abdulmecid to do a restoration. That’s their yellow paint job peeling off the upper walls, trying to match the original gold mosaic below. The Fossati Brothers found the Angel face plastered over. They carefully documented it, drew it, and according to Islam’s proscription on faces, covered it up with a medallion like the ones still on the other three. Our angel is on the northeastern pendentive. The ones to the west are trompe l’oeil to match the mosaic ones to the east. The southeastern medallion may have a face under it. I sure wish I knew.

Here are more faces from Hagia Sophia’s wonderful security staff. I drew each one at different times and separated them for gift prints. If you are going to spend any time drawing monuments, be nice to the guards.

RELENTLESS BEAUTY

St Irene in Pala d’Oro Altarpiece, St Mark’s, Venice

That there are faces at all on the walls of Hagia Sophia is due largely to Empress Irene of Athens, who ruled Byzantium at the turn of the eighth century to the ninth. Notice her shield and cross: she was a kind of warrior.

ICONS: PORTALS TO POWER Irene’s Emperor, Leo from Armenia, the first Iconoclast, is said to have been influenced by Islam in his abhorrence of icons. We all know icons as those little gizmos that pop up on your desktop, letting you know where to click to access all manner of things.

Their origin, like so much else, is pretty much Byzantine. What the Byzantines were accessing was faith. Here are some religious icons.

A modern program icon designer works with much the same limitations as the original religious painters. In a small space with limited colors you must create an instantly recognizable image that conveys a sense of where you want the viewer to go. We icon designers want you to know you’ll be transported to Desktop or Skype or Adobe Photoshop. The Byzantines wanted you to be transported into Faith. Faith that the saint represented by the icon would intervene with the Power of the Universe to help you. Come to think of it, they’re not so different.

Battle Over Icons, Medieval painting

DESTRUCTION OF ART Icons are a touchy subject. In Communist Russia you could get into a lot of trouble for possessing them. Many were said to perform miracles, survive all manner of cataclysm. In our time icon has come to mean a powerful representational figure, or face, like Hitler meaning Fascism, or Steve Jobs representing idealistic progress. The Byzantines prayed to pictures of the saints, lit candles to them, went on their knees before them, fought wars under and for them. The power was in the faith, but Emperor Leo believed that people worshipped the pictures themselves, so he destroyed them. All of them. Every icon, large and small, and then every pictorial mosaic, fresco and bas-relief went. Hagia Sophia is full of empty frames, carved marble around a vacant space, and lone, austere crosses. The original gold mosaic ceiling, with its geometric designs, was allowed to remain. After the Iconoclasts– the breakers of images– had done with the pictures, they started in on the artists. Leo is not my favorite emperor, but at least there aren’t a lot of pictures of him.

Ceiling Gold in Hagia Sophia

HELL HATH NO FURY… Irene his wife was an Iconodule or Iconophile: she loved icons. She is remembered as a beauty: a tall noble brunette. One fable has Leo discovering some icons she’d hidden, and refusing to sleep with her afterwards.

Harun Al-Rashid

Was she a woman scorned? Leo died in 775, and Irene set about gaining the throne. Beset by her own ministers, Bulgars, and Harun Al-Rashid, she never gave up…wait a minute. Worlds collide….Harun Al-Rashid? Isn’t he supposed to belong in Arabian Nights? Yes, and he did his best to invade Byzantium. Irene kept him out by paying him a whopping annual tribute. When the Pope refused to recognize her rule and crowned Charlemagne Roman Emperor, rather than sulking over the insult, she simply arranged to marry Charlemagne. But she was deposed first.

Medieval drawing of Pope Crowning Charlemagne

ECLIPSE OF THE SON Her son by Leo, Constantine VI, grew up in the shadow of his vivid autocratic mother. He too became an Iconoclast. When the inevitable clash came, Irene gave him short shrift: she seized the throne, and in the same purple chamber in which she had borne him, she had him blinded. He died of his wounds. This sickened the people, who proclaimed it “a horror of Heaven” and blamed on it a 17-day solar eclipse.

Irene and Constantine VI by Hubert Goltzius 16th-Century

THE SKULL CARAFE Nevertheless Irene ruled for five years before being replaced by her minister Nicophorus. You remember Nicophorus? Driven insane by incessant warfare in Bulgaria, he wound up beheaded by Krum the Horrible, Khan of the Bulgars, who had a silver-lined beerstien made of his head, and to the end of his days drank to his own health from the head of the Byzantine Emperor. That’s Nicophorus on the right, being carried in filled with beer.

Medieval drawing of Krum the Horrible with his famous Byzantine beerstein

THE SAINT The Iconoclasts stuck around until the mid-9th Century and finally petered out. Irene ended life on an island, spinning to support herself, and in Hagia Sophia, the heart of the kingdom she ravaged her soul to protect, there is no image of her. I doubt there’s one in Istanbul. Fourth Crusaders carried them all off to Venice, the city of that Doge thrown out of the window. Yet Irene endures, for she restored image worship in Christianity. Under her rule in 787, the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicea refuted the Iconoclasts, declaring that artistic materials merely represent the saints, a belief upheld to this day. The glorious pictorial mosaics of St Savior in Chora, as well as many surviving in Hagia Sophia, are all from after Irene. Throughout Christianity, religious art endures, and it always has a face.

Greek Orthodox Icon of St Irene of Athens

THE EVOLUTION OF AN ICON Santa Claus, called Noel Baba (Father Christmas) is big here in Turkey. St Nicholas himself was Bishop of Myra, down on Turkey’s Mediterranean Coast. A benevolent leader, he gave all his money to the poor, hiding dowries in the shoes of impoverished virgins to save their pride, which comes to us as the tradition of Christmas stockings. St Nicholas is huge all over Europe. Think of all those Greeks named Nick. Here’s one of many Russian icons of him.

Russian Icon-St Nicholas of Myra

At some point, he became mixed with Lapland myths of tall, fur-suited Father Christmas who lived with reindeer in the snow. Vikings were in Istanbul, the Varangian traders invited in the 9th Century. Here’s their graffiti in Hagia Sophia, and even I feel I’m stretching to imagine that’s when the mix began. But worlds DO collide here…could it be?

Victorian Clement Clark Moore turned Father Christmas / St Nicholas into “a right jolly old elf” in his iconographic (!) poem The Night Before Christmas. And in 1930, Coca-Cola hired Norwegian-American illustrator Haddon Sundblom to depict St Nick for their ads in the Saturday Evening Post. This became the prototype for Santa Claus as we know him today.

Haddon Sundblom for Coca-Cola, 1931

Justinian undoubtedly included icons of St Nicholas in Hagia Sophia. After all, he built the church at Myra in memory of the 3rd-Century saint.

SLEIGH BELLS STILL RINGING As the snow whirls in the darkness outside and the wind howls up over the mouth of the Bosporus, Chinese-manufactured Santas rock their hips down in Kumkapi as tourists eat Bosporus fish. . Two years ago, they told us that the Mayan Calendar was about to run out. Projected human history was ending, as the Calendar only runs until 2012. Surely the world was going to end as well! Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been crying that the world is going to end any minute. We’re two years into After the Mayan Calendar. We may be flying blind, but we’re still flying. The Grinch is still around — Christmas lights are now forbidden in Myra as anti-Islam– but so is Santa Claus. Try and eradicate Santa Claus. The world clearly needs a symbol of cheer in the darkness, of good living, of unity, for Santas appear everywhere in every medium, from cheap synthetic to solid gold. The world looks on, smiles, stuffs its stockings. Once again, Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

I sat on a hillside covered with wild mustard, drawing Byzantine bricks through chestnut trees just coming into bloom, and the whole world was yellow and green. A sunny day in April, and I was drawing in dead quiet: a 6th-century Byzantine site between a church of the same vintage and a wall, shown above, from somewhat later. The mustard rioted all over the hill and flooded down into the ruin, celebratory bursts of yellow against the dark pitted bricks. Nothing indicated that just over the wall hordes of camera-swinging tourists clogged the street. We love tourists here in Istanbul, their money and presence preserves antiquities. But I was grateful for the silence and solitude. The last public hordes to be in the ruin were a thousand years ago, and I could feel those years.

A breeze came up, fresh with approaching storm. As I drew, an image came clear in my mind’s eye, an image of a foot. A woman’s foot in a pointed slipper: beaded pink fabric on top, leather on the bottom, a ribbon around the ankle.

It stood on pale marble, near a marble fountain with a lion’s head, down in the very courtyard I was drawing, but clear of weeds. I froze. I let the image come. I thought of Theodora, the 6th-century harlot who became the pious and powerful Empress of Justinian.

A small woman with dark hair, in a light dress of powder blue and robes the color of red wine. She walked in the courtyard alone on a sunny day. Did Theodora visit this place? Was she ever alone, or did her attendants stand back in the shadows and let her wander in sunny solitude? Just a pipedream, but it would not let me rest. A mere pipedream of Theodora is as powerful as a banshee, the furious life force projecting down through the centuries. All day and night that pointed toe stood on the marble next to the fountain. For some reason it made me happy.

These mosaics were set by sixth-century fingers right into the dirt. They’re dark green and pale gray-green. Think how many earthquakes, fires and wars they’ve survived! Think of the feet that have walked on these chips of marble, the shoes they wore. Below the dirt is a cistern: here’s a well from outside the cafe up top. A dropped stone produces a deep satisfying sploosh.

So our ruin is the bottom of the structure: the Hospital of Sampson, built by a sainted doctor so adept, it is said, that he healed the Emperor Justinian of a hideous illness with the laying-on of his hand. His reward was the construction of this multistoried structure, a haven for the infirm poor, linking Hagia Sophia and Hagia Eirene. Being built by master architects in the pre-electric 6th century, it was full of sunny courtyards.

I was allowed to draw the site on the condition that I take no photos down in the ruin. Hagia Eirene’s fabulously aged façade runs straight down into it.

Hagia Eirene, the second Hagia Sophia (built by Theodosius I,) and the Hospital were all burned in the Nika Riots in 532. The Emperor Justinian re-built all of them, and both basilicas stand today. Here’s a section of the ruin at the base of Hagia Eirene. See the slanted bricks running behind the ruined section in front? There must have been a roof of some kind, later incorporated into the new Church and Hospital.

The Hospital ruin was excavated after WWII. Until four years ago, the structure in front of it was a private home. Its transformation to upscale cafe brought a fresh group of archeologists and students. A catwalk was built down into the site. Weeds were cleared, bits photographed and catalogued and stacked at the edges, large trees cut. Photographs can be seen at the cafe. Then the walkways were removed, and the site allowed to go back to the wild mustard. It’s lovely.

What did hospitals look like in the 6th century? We have an idea of the floor plan of this one, created in CGI by Byzantium 1200. Hagia Sophia is at the bottom and Hagia Eirene at the top. The Hospital is in the center, linking the two. Our area is to the far left.

The Hospital was built right onto Hagia Eirene. That explains those melted-looking brick lumps in Hagia Eirene’s façade.

Façade, Hagia Eirene

Here’s a satellite shot of the area from above. The Topkapi wall slants across from top left to bottom right, where the gate is. Hagia Sophia is bottom left, Hagia Eirene is the dome at top right. Karakol Restaurant is next to it at right center. See the Hospital?

The Hospital may have fallen into disuse, but I can’t discover when it collapsed or was demolished. It was probably when the Topkapi Wall was built, after 1453.

St Sampson the Hospitable, aka St Sampson the Innkeeper and Unmercenary, was the son of rich important Romans. Already well-educated, he continued to study medicine, and doctored the sick without charge. When his parents died he set his slaves free, passed out alms and prepared himself to go into the wilderness– which was likely anywhere outside of Rome.

Eventually he went East to Constantinople: Eastern Rome. He moved into a small house, took in strays– poor and sick people– and cared for them. Undoubtedly a good doctor, he was credited with healing hands, if not outright miracles. His fame grew and with it his ability to treat more people.

The Patriarch of Constantinople, in recognition of Sampson’s great virtue, ordained him to the holy priesthood. St Sampson the Hospitable kept many alive, but died young, in about CE 530, and was buried at the Church of Holy Martyr Mokios in Constantinople.

SAINT MOKIOS

St Mokios the Unmercenary

Scratch one saint in this town and you find another. St Mokios was another great physician, one of the Holy Unmercenary Physicians, twenty doctors in antiquity who refused to accept money for their services. They were all canonized.

Synaxis (Reunion) of the Holy Unmercenaries

Judging by his beard, St Sampson appears second from right in the front row. The earliest precepts of Christianity include acceptance and treatment of the sick, as evidenced by this painting of Christ visiting the lepers.

Christ Healing the Ten Lepers, Synaxis of the Holy Unmercenaries

St Mokios was beheaded around 295 for exhorting pagans to convert. His church was built on the site of a Temple of Zeus by Constantine in the next century, collapsed and was re-built by Justinian. Poetically, Sampson was interred there. People came to his tomb to be healed. His ghost continued, it is said, to kindly haunt his Hospital. Twice it upbraided a worker for laziness. Imagine the ashen-faced nurse trying to report that to a superior.

A Hospital in 1123

A huge fire in Constantinople burned so fiercely that the lead sheets on the top of Hagia Sophia melted, it was said, and poured like rain. Fervent prayers to St Sampson preceded a deluge of real rain that put out the fire and saved the hospital. Think of the staff and patients alike shouting in prayer, nurses helping cripples to kneel, others lying muttering, flat on their backs clutching crucifixes, flickering light on the medical treatises rolled in the pigeonholes, doctors frozen with their instruments, eyes squeezed shut or white all the way around in terror, the air charged, the tension pulled to the snapping point, and the final, overwhelming crash of thunder, the release of rain, the screams of relief and joy, of renewed faith.

Here’s a splendid cathedral in St Petersburg, Russia, in honor of the Saint.

The Cathedral of St Sampson the Hospitable in St Petersburg, Russia

Azure and white, with its own reflection pool, it houses this spectacular iconostasis.

Iconostasis in St Sampson’s Cathedral, St Petersburg, Russia

I think of the actual Saint and his austerity, his love for the poor.

BYZANTINE MEDICINE

Emperor Justinian’s famous mosaic portrait in Ravenna, Italy

If you were going to get sick in the Dark Ages, best to do it in Constantinople. It remained a beacon of light and learning in a world increasingly darkened by ignorance and superstition. Byzantine medicine was full of discovery, as well as preserving medical practices from the golden age of ancient culture, all of which influenced Islamic medicine. When the Western world began to wake up in the Renaissance, the information was there, waiting to make the world well.

Angels and Demons in a 13th-century Medieval Hospital

By Medieval times, medical treatment in Europe was largely a matter of prayer, with angels or demons responding to carry off the patient. But 6th-century Constantinople was still lit by the glow of ancient Greek and Roman enlightenment. Byzantine society was educated. Primary school was easily available for both boys and girls, even in the villages. Women played a large part in Byzantine culture. The Augusta Pulcheria, sister to Emperor Theodosius II, had established women on a par with the Holy Virgin Mary and set them on a course of, if not equality, respect.

Medieval Nurses in Tournai

The legend of Justinian’s healing by St Sampson, resulting in our Hospital, is likely true. Justinian subsidized private physicians to work publicly six months of the year, a breakthrough in medicine. Our Hospital would have had a Chief Physician: Archiatroi, professional nurses: Hypourgoi, and orderlies: Hyperetai.

A hundred years before Justinian, in 425, Theodosius the Second’s beautiful Empress Eudocia, a highly educated Greek, established the first University at Constantinople: The Pandidakterion. It was in the Magnaura Palace, now being excavated behind the Four Seasons, next to Hagia Sophia, in Sultanahmet. Along with law, philosophy, geometry, astronomy and music, it taught medicine. A hundred years later, the new Hospital of Sampson opened almost next door. It’s likely that its fledgling doctors, then as now, interned at the hospital for the poor.

Birds, from the Vienna Dioscorides Folio, 515 CE

Here’s a gallery of birds from the Vienna Dioscorides, an illuminated manuscript in Greek, created in 515 in Western Rome. Over the following centuries it became a hospital textbook, containing treatments for snakebite and other calamities. It certainly was used in Constantinople, for it was discovered here in the 1560s and identified as the famous textbook.

Examination of a Leper, Dark Ages manuscript

By the late seventh century, doctors at the Hospital would have had access to The Medical Compendium in Seven Books, a distillation of information by one Paul of Aegina, a respected physician. He appears to have deserved respect, as the Compendium was in use as a standard medical textbook for the next 800 years.

St Bartholemew’s Hospital, 12th-century

By the 12th century, Constantinople had well-organized hospitals, medical specialists, wards segregated to treat specific diseases, and systematic treatments. They even had women doctors, those Byzantines. Faith was important. After the groundbreaking Hospital of Sampson, hospitals were built next to churches, and later, under the Ottomans, next to mosques. When medicine failed, Byzantine patients prayed with icons of Cosmas and Damien, patron saints of medicine and doctors. Continued emphasis on charity resulted in medicine being available to all.

Treatment of Mental Disorders, Medieval treatise

Many other great physicians practiced in Constantinople, but the atrocity of the Fourth Crusade slowed medical development in the 13th century. Still the Hospital of Sampson survived. When the infamous Italian Crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204, they converted the Hospital into a Western Roman hospital– a hostel for poor and sick pilgrims.

Medieval Monks in a Hostel

This soon organized into a military order and became quite rich, spawning a daughter institution in Flanders. When the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople in 1261, the Brothers of St Sampson fled to Corinth and built a hospital there, a multipurpose unit that, among many commercial ventures, actually served the poor.

A Medieval Hospital in Spain

ROLLING SAINT LUKE’S BONES

Like those nesting Russian dolls, one fitting inside the other, we come at last to the core Saint Physician. Were St Sampson and St Mokios influenced by St Luke? He was buried just up the hill at Holy Apostles. Both saints had similar stories. Both came from wealthy families, were highly educated, practiced medicine, and gave everything to the poor. A contemporary of Jesus, St Luke healed the sick, painted his pictures, wrote his gospels, grew old and died in Bithynia, now in Western Turkey.

St Luke in a painting by Andrea Mantegna, 1454

Relics of St Luke were interred, with Byzantine splendor, by Constantine in 357 at the Church of Holy Apostles in Constantinople, now the site of Fatih Camii (Mosque) in Istanbul’s Old City. Many saints and emperors were eventually buried there, including Justinian and Constantine.

Church of the Holy Apostles

A fire that destroyed the church left the coffins of the saints untouched. Justinian rebuilt Holy Apostles in 527, just up the hill from the Hospital. The holy and imperial tombs were eviscerated in 1204 by Italian Crusaders, who grabbed the gold and threw the bones to the dogs in the street. According to an aghast contemporary account, this is what happened to St Luke.

Siege of Constantinople in 1204 by Jacopo Tintoretto

Another account has a grim 8th-century priest stealing St Luke’s bones, as well as a painting of the Virgin by the saint, to save them from the Iconoclasts. Still another says St Thomas the Apostle spirited St Luke’s painting to India around 50 CE. The legend of St Luke’s artistic endeavors includes as many True Paintings as there are True Relics, but it did result in his being Patron Saint of Artists, and for that I salute him with this post.

One of many depictions of St Luke painting the Virgin, from the Byzantine Museum in Athens

An excited recent post from Padua, Italy, reports the saint’s entire skeleton found in a lead coffin there, including the skull which spent a time with Charlemagne. Did some abject Crusader, fired with remorse or venality, pick up the relics and pack them off? Charlemagne pre-dated the Fourth Crusade by four centuries, so what about those stories of the Skull being at Holy Apostles? While the bones continue to cause fuss, the spirit of the great physician and evangelist of the New Testament has never left us. It undoubtedly inspired Sampson.

Their works fared better. All over the Middle East is the visual history of Constantinople, of Justinian and Theodora, in churches standing and savaged, in the foundations of the mosques, hospitals ruined and rumored as well. The study of medicine continues in universities worldwide, continuing the work of one gorgeous dedicated Greek girl. And worldwide is the legacy of the Unmercenaries: medical care for the poor. Despite the railroading of medicine by the rich in so many countries, free clinics keep springing up. The marriage of medicine and faith continues in Islam and Christianity and Quantum Physics, in the study of psychosomatic medicine, in the emphasis on mood as it affects the immune system. As always, the light that burned in Constantinople still flares and flickers like a torch in the winds of ignorance, but has yet to be put out. Down in the courtyard the cats play in the ruined fountain, but under the weeds the lion still roars.

5th century AD: Furious clamor as police descend on Constantinople’s Chalkoprateia, the Bronze District, where Jewish artisans live, creating and selling bronze items. Screaming in outrage, bearded Jews in caps are dragged from their shops, beaten, banished. An earlocked apprentice frantically holds up an unfinished bronze shield in futile defense as Imperial soldiers burst into the workshop. The synagogue is emptied, soldiers posted at the door, sacred items hurled into the street. The Augusta has finally bullied her brother the Emperor into turning the Chalkoprateia Synagogue into a church.

Last week, Berkin Elvan Riots, Istanbul

There’s a civic earthquake going on in Istanbul right now, over authority and religion and the way people want to live: rioting and explosions, horrific images in the news, chanting in the distance, yelling in the night. This is nothing new in this city. The same things have been going on here for centuries of political heave and surge: angry crowds jostling; people pummeled by Imperial police, falling in the streets; banners flying over faces ragged with rage; smoke and screams filling the air, all over authority, religion and the way people want to live. A lot of this happened right here in Sultanahmet. Now it’s kept peaceful for Tourism, but blink your eyes and it’s the fifth century: rage and fire; clash of swords on bronze; a dropped loaf of bread; a toy wagon trampled into the dust.

THE IMPERIAL VIRGIN Her name was Pulcheria. She lorded over her brother Theodosius II and the people with an iron fist clothed in the sanctification of consecrated virginity. She built churches and cared for the poor, but she hated Jews. She forced them out of one area after another, suspended all construction on synagogues within the city walls. The Chalkoprateia Synagogue, built in 318, was closed and its congregation banished. With fatal irony the confiscated synagogue was consecrated as Theotokos, the God-Bearer, in the name of Holy Mary, that Jewish Virgin that Pulcheria so identified with herself. It would be her only child. WIth successive reigns, Theotokos in Chalkoprateia rose in glory, at one time Constantinople’s greatest church. It survived centuries of triumph and disaster, eventually becoming a mosque. Today there is only a broken pillar, a buried chapel and two weedy walls to mark it.

GHOST CHURCH Little mysteries: the stub of a pillar, its break rounded with age, sticking up through the sidewalk next to a parking lot. Across the narrow street, another pillar-sized lump, mortared all over with stones. Nearby, two arches stacked in front of a staircase going into a hill, with a brick barrel-vault ceiling, leading up to a bright pink-stuccoed wall behind a mosque. From the harsh recent restoration, you’d never dream how old it is. A block away, another pillar stub sticking out of the sidewalk. This one is a different kind of marble.

L to R: pillar stub, double arch, barrel-vault, second pillar stub.

Across the street, a haphazard pile of rubble, mortared here and there to lumps of Byzantine brick.

Through a chink in the mortar, a flashlight glimpse of a Byzantine brick arch down below the street.

A door-shaped area on a plaster wall showing the antiquity beneath.

A sealed iron door in an old wall under a row of hotels. A hoary wall rearing up between a parking lot and a restaurant terrace. A ragged ruin over the Basilica Cistern, its windows Ottoman, its foundation Byzantine. Just hints, clues in a puzzle.

Once consecrated as holy, a place cannot be de-consecrated. So says a dear friend. Since he is a Canon in his church, with a lifetime spent studying such things, I listen to him. If so, then there is a certain parking lot in my old Sultanahmet neighborhood that is holy as all get-out, and on three theological pillars to boot: Muslim, Christian and Judaic. Before that, there was most likely some Pagan altar with flute and drum, an ancient withered seer behind the statue of the god, angels with wings coming out of their hips…

Walking around here for years, mentally lining up all these clues; speculating on some great temple all across the hill, its perfect Greek geometry leveling the lumpy streets. We must create our picture from minute fragments. Like sex in the movies under the old moralistic American Production Code, we have to make our guesses from the architectural equivalent of a hairpin on a pillow: that lone pillar stub sticking up out of the cobblestones. Our hairpin, so to speak, led to St Jacob’s Chapel, hidden under a building near the foot of the hill. Going down!

ST JACOB’S

Once lush with fresco, most of it is bare dirt-encrusted brick, an octagon chapel around a massive solid brick octagon pier, lime-mortared, indestructible. God knows what it held up. A baptistry? An obelisk? A statue?

Its owners have taken excellent care of St Jacob’s since they acquired the property in the 1930s, and many scholars have studied it. Traces of frescoes remain, still lovely.

Fifth-century frescoes are rare in Istanbul. They may have looked like this Jesus, from an early-Christian Armenian church.

Here’s a first take on St Jacob’s done back in 2007, a crumbling frescoed halo catching the light, a kindly cowled face imagined for no reason, in the shadows where once there was a doorway leading… where?

Friends opened a hotel next door. They found Byzantium in their basement, too.

Just down the street is Zeynep Sultan Camii (Mosque), its wavy roof echoing that of Kalendarhane Camii up the hill. While drawing it back in 2004, I learned that the neighborhood was called in Byzantine times Chalkoprateia, and that it was the Bronze District, where Jewish craftsmen created and sold bronze items. Kalendarhane was restored in the 18th century… Zeynep Sultan was built in 1769. Was it built on the site of a vanished church? Or was the church over St Jacob’s Chapel?

As usual, sources differ as to whether the octagon chapel is St Jacob’s or St James. Was there, perhaps, another chapel? Same size, nearby? A little digging produced this schematic from the 1960s, based, say St Jacob’s owners, on one from the 1920s.

It’s astonishing how accurate this is, considering that the authors did not have access to Google Maps. Some merged screen dumps produced this overview of the area:

See the parking lot at center? The tramline runs down the right, and Hagia Sophia, not shown, is just beyond it. The Basilica Cistern is under that large rough pale area bottom center. That tiny circle top right is Zeynep Sultan’s dome.

Here it is with those little clues. Hm.

Hours of manipulating images produced this superimposition. And cold chills.

Holy Mother of God.

THE IMPERIAL VIRGIN

Fifteen years of walking about this neighborhood, tea in carpet shops, coffee and gossip, friends, errands, parties, informal tours, drawing, and all the while this great slumbering ghost sprawled across the hill. These shabby old bits I call clues were part of an edifice so important by the 8th century that it held an alleged Girdle of the Virgin. This is hotly contested by at least one Byzantine scholar, but I like to think about St Mary’s robe floating in the ether of a Byzantine collective memory, down under the tourist eateries, travel agencies, and Ottoman plaster.

The Cambrai Madonna from the Met.

The mid-5th century was early days for the great Christian empire. Constantine the Great, who declared Christianity the official religion, had only been gone a hundred years. The city had been Constantinople for only a century, full of Pagan echoes, in the sacred fantastical animals, in the worship of the saints. The great Theodosian Walls, those hulking savaged monuments still standing, were new, built by Anthemius, Regent of the Eastern Roman Empire, named after the crowned child, Theodosius II.

The weak young Emperor Arcadius was dead, and his hated sensuous Empress Eudoxia was dead as well. Their son Theodosius II was crowned at age seven, but it was his sister who ruled: Aelia Pulcheria, granddaughter to Theodosius the Great, the Emperor who set up the Egyptian Obelisk in the Hippodrome in 390, who built the second Hagia Sophia that was burned in the Nika Rebellion of 532. All three generations had the same cold pale eyes.

Pulcheria and her brother, Theodosius II

Pulcheria was nine when she began to train her little brother to be Emperor. In stark contrast to her scandalous mother, who wore bangs like a courtesan and flaunted her infidelities, she took a Vow of Chastity, consecrating her virginity to God. Her piety was undeniable, but she was also menaced by Anthemius the Wall-Builder who was determined to marry into the royal family. The Vow protected her. She blocked all his avenues and made her sisters swear virginity, too. It must have been grim: three dour princesses stitching altar cloths in a palace forbidden to men and levity of any kind. Anthemius might have been a better ruler, but at 15 Pulcheria sacked him and proclaimed herself Regent, declaring herself Augusta, Empress of the Eastern Roman Empire.

THE CULT OF THE VIRGIN

Patriarch Nestorius

Easter Sunday, 428, a church by the Theodosian Walls, filled with the elite. Heading in a grand processional toward the Sanctuary, Pulcheria ran smack into Nestorius, the new Patriarch of Constantinople. He barred her from entering the holiest place. Her womanhood made her unfit, he said, only men were pure enough. “I have kept myself pure as gold,” said the Consecrated Virgin, “as clean as fleece. Haven’t I given birth to God?” “You are a sinner,” he said, “you have given birth to Satan.”

This was the beginning of a hammer-and-tongs feud that lasted years and shaped Christianity forever. Nestorius accused Pulcheria of adultery, of cheating on Christ with men, dogs, infidel. Pulcheria retaliated by declaring that she was as Mary, Mother of Jesus, and that Mary was divine, the Mother of God, giving rise to the Cult of the Virgin.

The dignity and power of women in Christianity took shape under the blue cowl of Mary’s robe. By the time she was done, an insult to Pulcheria was an insult to the Theotokos, to the Great Holy Virgin Mother herself.

11th-century Mary in Hagia Sophia

Pulcheria was a powerful force in shaping the future of rule of kings, investing awe and holiness surrounding kingship. In taking on Nestorius she gave women a powerful new status in the new religion, ensuring that Mary was right up there with her son. The Cult of the Virgin has been at loggerheads with Christianity ever since, but here in Byzantium, through their identification with Mary, women gained power.

Nestorius, in addition to quashing women, tried to quash theater, circus, games, mimes, and exotic halftime dancers at the Chariot Races, not a good idea if one wants to stay popular. His attempt to micromanage the monasteries pissed off the monks. At one memorable sermon, the monk Basil loudly derided Nestorius and was roundly cheered by the congregation. At last Nestorious was declared a heretic and exiled, leaving Pulcheria ensconced on her chaste throne. He railed at Constantinople from the Holy Land, becoming one prong of a fork in the faith: Jesus Human and Christ Divine, two natures in one person: Nestorianism, was on one side. Jesus Christ Entirely Divine, which became Monophyism, was on the other. This argument was still going strong a hundred years later in Justinian’s time and after. Many, many riots in the streets.

Theodosius II, more interested in manuscript illumination than politics, let his sister lead the Empire. At 19, he told her that he didn’t care what they made him marry so long as it was beautiful. Athenais, a gorgeous Greek girl beggared by the death of her father, flung herself on the mercy of philanthropic Pulcheria, probably to avoid becoming a whore. Pulcheria took a look, heard the exquisite Greek, and married her to Theodosius II. He fell passionately in love. They re-named her Eudocia.

The beautiful Eudocia soon gained popularity over thin-lipped ascetic Pulcheria, who began to loathe her. Eudocia and the chief minister, Eunuch Chrysaphius, convinced the affable Theodosius II to give his relentless sister less credence, causing Pulcheria to move out of the palace, but her tentacles continued to creep toward her enemies. Eudocia wasn’t just a pretty face: she sponsored education, founded a university. But eventually Theodosius was persuaded away from her. She proclaimed herself a supporter of Nestorianism and left for the Holy Land, to die in sad obscurity. But oh, she had been loved, by her husband and by the people. Portraits abound. There are several in Istanbul’s Archeological Museum. She’s still beautiful.

Augusta Pulcheria

After her brother’s death, Pulcheria returned to the palace and fought the Eunuch. The Senate refused to grant her sole rule, so she found a weakling who wouldn’t try to sleep with her, Marcias, and married him. Then she executed Chrysaphius. Pulcheria continued to build churches, feed the poor, import relics, persecute Jews, and proclaim the divine nature of Christ and her own implied divinity. For her pains she was canonized. For her elevation of women throughout the Empire and down through the ages, she deserves it. This aescetic, grandiose, furious, passionate, selective philanthropist is now a Greek Orthodox saint. There’s a school named after her right here in my neighborhood, Sainte Pulcherie.

THEOTOKOS IN CHALKOPRATEIA was heavily mosaiced and lavishly frescoed. It was tall and imposing, but has vanished utterly.

Church of Galla Placida, Ravenna.

Here’s the north aisle, heading toward Hagia Sophia. While this Hagia Sophia was being built, from 532 to 537, our church was the Seat of the Patriarchate of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The famous mosaics, covering the Life of the Virgin, were destroyed in the 8th century by Iconoclasts, but the Relics of the Virgin remained in its walls.

St Mark’s in Venice

Here’s a wall along the south aisle.

The gilded coffered ceiling and the doors of silver, electrum and gold were sold off by Emperor Alexios Komnenos in the 11th century to finance a defense against a Norman threat. Before Alexios, Theotokos’ interior likely resembled this:

This parking lot is the nave, and we’re walking toward the altar, which faced east and Hagia Sophia.

Under Latin rule from 1204 to 1261, our church became a cathedral occupied by priests: Sancta Maria de Cinctur, or St Mary of the Shingles. Workshops probably made shingles in the area by then, or perhaps the priests had them. Considering what the Latin Crusaders did to Constantinople, we can only hope. Here’s the surviving 4th or 5th century Byzantine wall.

It’s still standing because in 1484, 31 years after the Ottoman Conquest, the ruined church, nee synagogue, was converted to a mosque by order of one Lala Hayruddin. In 1755, by order of Vizier Mehmet Said Pasha, the mosque was restored and re-consecrated as Acem Aga Mescidi. Down the street, in 1769, Zeynep Sultan Mosque was built and consecrated. In 1814 this fountain in the street was built. See that Byzantine wall next to it? And the tribal carpet for sale next to that? These juxtapositions are why I live here. And, of course, tripping over the occasional Ghost Church.

By 1936, Turkey’s zeitgeist was not religious, and the mosque was abandoned, slowly falling into weedy disrepair. It’s been derelict since 1936, subsumed by the city. If you go up to the terrace at Alemdar Restaurant to watch the Dervishes whirl in front of Hagia Sophia, you can see this from the stairs: the last relic of the altar of Theotokos in Chalkoprateia.

—

The street running from one pillar stub to the double arches has always been spooky at night, in a high, cool, grey, waiting kind of way.

So why, why is this important? It isn’t even my history. I haven’t a drop of Jewish, Greek, or Turkish blood. So what. The history of this place is beyond any one people: it’s the history of the whole world. As a friend says, it’s a matter of respect. Hell, it’s a matter of awe. Seventeen hundred years of toil and care, smoke and love and holy water, men and women in anguish and triumph– it matters. It matters so much that there was a temple here, that there was art here, that there was worship here. Blood of sacrilege, blood of sacrifice, Blood of the Lamb…That high, stone-cool waiting feeling of the streets in the dead quiet of night is from layers and layers of living that all happened here, a concentration of experience. If you say Constantinople over and over, faster and faster, slurring the sounds, it becomes Istanbul. To paraphrase Casablanca, it’s like any other place, only more so. Our parking lots are really cathedrals.

Special thanks to Suleyman, custodian of the Last Wall of Theotokos in Chalkoprateia, next to his terrace at Alemdar Restaurant. Their Dervish show is aces. Special thanks to the custodians of St Jacob’s Chapel, who wish to remain anonymous. And thanks to all the Byzantine scholars who have generously made their work readily available, on the Internet, to someone not affiliated with any university. We are none of us much without the others.

Oh, it’s cold now in Istanbul. Days like diamonds: brilliant sunshine, icy in the shadows. The sun fools you into wearing a lighter coat, and then it sets. Such a fantasy, Istanbul, amid seas and waterways. But its magnificent trees, butchered for years now by misguided municipal pruning, look in winter like spindly desiccated fingers sprouting from wizened fists. All I can think about is how it feels to get off the train in Plovdiv and look up, up, up into the exquisite embroidery of those natural trees against the sky.

I found Plovdiv quite by accident. I just needed to go someplace in Bulgaria by train, because the bus had become impossible.

GRIM CROSSING Bulgarian/Turkish border, Winter 2007, 3AM. Turkish side. Dark and cold. Dogs and uniforms under guard towers. Leaping light from huge bonfires at the edge of a crowded parking lot piled with our opened suitcases. The ground glittered: sugar, slashed from people’s packages, littered with dark islands of flung spices. At the bonfires, yelling uniformed men hurled bottle after bottle of confiscated booze and watched them explode. People were crying. My seat-mate had lost all her sugar and spices, bought cheap in Bulgaria for her restaurant in Istanbul. Laughing, shouting customs agents had ripped them out of her luggage. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. We all kept our heads down, praying to be allowed to repack our belongings and get back on the bus to Istanbul.

Long ago before the laws changed, it was possible to live for years in Turkey on a tourist visa. One simply left the country for one day every three months. The bus was cheapest.

Border Check

The border crossing could go into six hours at that time, what with all the queues and checkpoints. A friend had asked me to buy her four bottles of Johnny Walker and two cartons of cigarettes, advertised on the Internet as legal. Trudging along the row of duty-free border stores, my seat-mate and I saw 4-packs of whiskey, labelled “4 for the price of 3.” I bought the smokes, but the bus driver told us that the Turks were confiscating alcohol over one bottle per passenger, so I bought only two and asked my seat-mate to carry the other one. We got back on the bus and crossed to Turkey, where we ran into that Inferno-like parking-lot luggage check. We were allowed to keep our one bottle each, but one of my cartons of cigarettes was confiscated by our friend the bus driver. Back on the bus, the air turned thick as the entire bus illegally smoked my swiped carton.

We were eventually told that sixty Turkish customs agents had been arrested for corruption, and their cohorts were taking it out on the rest of us. When I got back, sick from smoke and sleep deprivation, I gave my friend her two bottles and one carton. She said, “What? Why, I would never have put up with that, I know my rights. I’m an American.”

After that, I quit the bus for the train. You can lie down on the train.

MARILYN MONROE IN PLOVDIV

Spelled “Merilyn” to avoid the long arm of MGM, this cigarette campaign was all the rage a few years ago. I also bought Ray Ben sunglasses. Drawing in a cafe, it thrilled my Los Angeles soul to see it snow and snow. I was less thrilled later, when I realized my boots were too slick to go anywhere.

Compared to the bus, the night train border crossing was a picnic. Still it had left me groggy. I got off the train, that first time, and staggered up out of the underpass to see trees. Huge thunderhead trees. I cried out loud at the sight, there in the street. In Bulgaria, the parks are lush and the trees gloriously crowned. I loved Plovdiv so much that I went there thirteen times, every three months for three years, until I got my Turkish Residence visa. I’d take the overnight train to Plovdiv, walk around all day, and catch the midnight train back to Istanbul.

Sure, you can get pork in Istanbul. After all, Istanbul is an international, eclectic, tolerant city. But their hearts just aren’t into serving pig. One friend told me “they say the air stinks of pork in Plovdiv.” I hadn’t noticed, I was eating pork ribs, juice running down my chin. Someone needs to do a T-shirt: I GOT PORKED IN PLOVDIV.

Reading Plovdiv’s history, I see a regal figure enduring a continual costume change, its integrity as eternal as its ancient walls. Little old Plovdiv, Bulgaria, is the oldest continuously occupied city in Europe. It’s so old it fell to Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon, who gave it one of its ancient names: Philippopolis.

Recently discovered Roman tunnel on Nebet Tepe Fortress.

Some sources say it’s 6000 years old, some say 8,000. A city on a plain, at the Maritza River, with seven rocky tower-like hills. Nobody knows the name of the original Neolithic settlement. The Thracians called the city Eumolpias, after the son of Poseidon, and then Pulpedeva. Later, under Roman rule, it was a major crossroads and cultural center, called Trimontium, after the three largest hills.

Plovdiv’s Roman ruins are plentiful and immaculate, like this well-preserved stadium under a shopping center. The most famous is the Roman theater, still open for business, clinging to a rocky cliffside.

In the Middle Ages the city was Byzantine, once again called Philippopolis, as the residents sang songs of Alexander’s heroics 1300 years before. After the Byzantines, Slavs called it Peldin, Plepdiv, Ploudin. Ottomans seized the city in the fourteenth century, re-naming it Filibe, from “Philip.”

Next to it, a tall gabled house boasts an enormous door. I banged on it one icy day and met Krasi, who was ensconced with colleagues in a toasty back room of what turned out to be a museum: The House of Dimitar Georgiadi. I gratefully accepted tea and a spot on the couch. “Oh, you live in Istanbul,” they said, “Here’s a book by your countryman.” They handed me a book written by an American in the 1800s. A sentence leaped out: …there were still traces of chemises on the small skeletons scattered through the rocks and trees… It was an account of the conflict leading to the Battle of Philippopolis, which expelled the Ottomans in 1898. The city has been “Plovdiv” ever since.

Upstairs in the museum are glass cases with all manner of things. I gathered that the people who wore this clothing, shot these guns, were fighting Ottoman forces. Krasi and her colleagues welcomed me many times and I was able to get this drawing of all-felt guerrilla clothing and weapons. I imagine the fierce young men in the mountains, nothing to do but decorate those guns and fire them.

In 1892 Lucien Chevallaz, the moustached gent on the statue above, created Tsar Simeon’s Garden: a large rambling park full of giant trees, floored in winter with thick snow. The drawing above was done before snowfall, but on the trip when I got stuck in the cafe, this was how it looked.

Walking was so slippery I couldn’t risk it. I had no Bulgarian, my phone didn’t work there, and I had only enough money for the day. So I stayed inside. Not much of a view in there. I was miserable because all I wanted was to see Old Town in the snow.

But from all those one-day trips, Krasi and I had become friends. She sent me these pictures she took on that day, and permission to share them with you. Thank you, Krasimira Marinova! Here she is in summer.

There are Christian churches all over Plovdiv, preserved behind the Iron Curtain, now flourishing. These old churches are dark and beautiful with the glint of gold and crystal, Orthodox Christian churches with icons that help me to imagine how the Byzantine churches were here in Istanbul, before they became mosques.

There are mosques in Plovdiv, pagan temples, and synagogues, although most of the Jews departed for the new state of Israel. They were able to because 20th-century Plovdiv saved its Jews: in 1943 Cyril, Archbishop of Plovdiv and future Bulgarian Patriarch, intervened to prevent 1500 deportations to the camps.

Decades after the god-proscribing Soviet rule, the tone of Bulgaria is Christian. Saints decorate money and civic buildings. On a recent side trip to Sofia, I found a spectacular subway saint, and a tomb worth sharing.

Attracted to its chartreuse roof I drew this before I went inside. And in there, I found the tomb of the original Handsome Prince, beloved Prince Alexander Battenberg, 1857-1893, First Prince of the new country of Bulgaria.

Respected for his diplomatic and military skills, he ruled for only five years before being deposed at gunpoint, forced to resign because of dealings with Russia.

The Prince fell in love with Viktoria, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, but the other side of the family blocked the marriage. The disappointed princess, doomed to a short marriage and one miscarriage with another prince, eventually married a gigolo and died destitute and alone. Just look at her expression: she knows he’s a rotter, but she’s determined to wrest some semblance of happiness from life.

Left: Young Viktoria. Right: Viktoria and last husband.

Johanna, Countess Hartenau

Prince Battenberg fared better but not for long. After his forced abdication he married Johanna Loisinger, an opera singer everybody liked, and retired to private life. They had two children before he died. As the Countess Hartenau, patroness of the arts in Vienna, she outlived him by fifty years, dying in 1951.

The Battenbergs were a large and influential family. Because of anti-German sentiment, the British branch of the family changed their name to Mountbatten. Yes, Lord Mountbatten who helped India get ready for independence and who was blown up on his yacht by IRA terrorists. Lord Mountbatten carried on the family popularity: his murder brought down the wrath of the entire world on the Irish Republican Army.

As to Prince Alexander, his only failing seems to have been a lack of ruthlessness. “Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest–” or at least the memory of two great loves.

SKULL CARAFE

Krum the Horrible, Medieval Woodcut

At the other end of the spectrum, a thousand years before Prince Alexander, Khan Krum the Horrible reigned over the Bulgars. No shortage of ruthlessness here! You remember him, don’t you? That 9th-century ruler who declared war on the Byzantines. He kept at it until Emperor Nicophorus had to suit up and gallop off to Bulgaria ahead of the Byzantine Army. Krum surrendered, but not until after he’d driven Nicophorus crazy. Berserk with rage, Nicophorus kept slaughtering, forcing Krum to summon allies to defeat him. The Bulgar forces found Nicophorus dead on a dung-heap after the battle. Krum beheaded him and had his skull made into a silver-lined beerstein, with which he drank his own health until the end of his days. Medieval artists did their best, but I always picture Krum as looking like something out of Frazetta. He certainly inspires art like this:

VIRTUAL JUSTICE Eleven PM always found me exhausted on the train platform. Plovdiv’s train station is 19th-century grandeur that went through the Iron Curtain. In winter it’s grim and cold. Nobody speaks English, the bathroom is permanently broken, and the train to Istanbul is always late.

February 2010: In the tiny ticket office, four clerks huddled around a space heater. None of them wanted to tell me anything. Above them, grimy walls went up forever into peeling paint covered with frost and cobwebs. It was the back of the back of beyond, a Central European Kafka Gulag nightmare. Then I noticed they were riveted to a beat-up old computer, and on it was a DVD. They were not cold, they were not even there. In this grim technological desert, they were watching Avatar. State of the art, and you couldn’t get it online or in stores, it was still in US theaters but not yet in Bulgaria. It was the scene where the collective is trying to bring someone back from the dead. On Facebook, I had read endless griping from LA friends about Avatar. It was quite the fashion back home to hate this movie. But out here in the all-too-real world, Cameron’s archetypes and tableaux of war and oppression spoke to sympathetic ears; that blue tribal communion was gorgeous, a dream of freedom, beauty, triumph over hideous uncontrollable forces. I was glad to see this harbinger from my old hometown, and equally glad to be free of those LA attitudes. The longer I’m gone from the place I was born, the more I feel like myself. In this alien land full of strangers, where I can’t even speak the language, I feel at home.

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT! It’s lovely to see you, all 25,000 reads, Stateside and in Turkey and in the UK, and astonishing that we are still being read in all through the Balkans, Scandinavia, Asia, Europe. I love that there are so many readers in Greece and that one has become such a good friend, thank you! Greetings and thanks to our readers in Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and welcome Morocco! I wonder if the single read in several African countries was a tourist, and happy I’ve gotten to visit Africa at last. I don’t know how I picked up 151 reads in Brazil, but if the Mad Brazilian Hatter has anything to do with it, thank you Du! We had 27 reads in Peru, a place I’ve only seen from repeated viewings of Motorcycle Diaries, God love you all. It thrills me that our very first reader, Anne Weiner, is still reading and commenting, thank you Anne! Yes, I get a real glow on, knowing that all across the great Russian plain, across those Arabian sands, down in the steam and swelter of the Amazon, people are reading this blog. Thank you, and thanks to all the people about whom it is written and drawn. We are none of us much without the others.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! If you’d like to see more, the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog, and I must say they’ve done a good job. Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

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All my life I wanted to go to Morocco. Everybody in my generation, it seemed, hit that old hippie trail and came back glowing with wonders. Crosby, Stills & Nash released “Marrakech Express,” conjuring up exotic imagery enjoyed by everyone, it seemed, but me. And for years: See some piece of delicate furniture with an exquisite filigree pattern, it’s from Morocco. A soft brown robe with a hood, perfect for coming from the hot tub at night… “Oh, I picked this up in Morocco.” Hooded robes, hooded eyes, French accents, fezzes, intrigue…oh, to be on that train…

At last, I got to go. And when I came back, I loaded up the movie Casablanca and watched it yet again, and you know, they nailed it. People don’t dress that well, and nobody is as beautiful as in that movie, but those production designers knew their stuff.

Musee Said, an old palace in the Souk.

Around 1975 a friend described sitting up all night on a rooftop in Morocco, drawing and dreaming. He strongly suggested I do the same. It only took me four decades, but here’s the view from Riad Twenty, our digs in Marrakech. In a single life-changing stroke of fortune, someone gave me a holiday there and told me I could bring a friend, so I invited my sister Penelope, who lives in California. We hadn’t seen each other in seven years.

This recent summer in Istanbul was challenging, with no end in sight. Tourism took a powder after the Great Gezi Park Gassing, and money was tight. My new book, Drawing On Istanbul 2, months delayed, was still at the printer when I left. I knew I’d come home to a pile of bills, and I’d been unable to line anything up to take care of them. So I went on this magnificent holiday and forgot about coming home. A nice trick if you can do it. This will change me, I thought. The person I am when I get back, she’ll know how to deal with it. That person is now me… and she did. The book is taking care of everything. At the bottom of this page, you can see about getting one, and now I can tell you about Marrakech.

Sheltered by the Atlas Kabe mountains, watered by their snowmelt, it’s a prized and cherished garden spot, full of exotica. In the three-hour drive from the airport in Casablanca, our guide Hicham told me that the French loved Morocco for its fertility and warmth. We drove past many cactus farms, encouraged by the King to promote economic stability. Eight ethnic groups, said Hicham, normally fight, but now there is peace since all owe allegiance to the King. I noticed two things right off: minarets here are not spikes but square towers with domed tops, and the cactus is that pale green paddle stuff. After so long in Istanbul’s congestion, my cramped eyes felt like they were stretching.

Riad 20 courtyard, from their website.

RIAD TWENTY: In the middle of Marrakech’s Old Medina or souk– the marketplace– is this classic Moroccan family house, two tiers of tiled rooms around a central courtyard with a pool and a tree, sparkling white with curlicues and patterned tile, beautifully restored its owner, designer Robert Bell. Penny and I breakfasted each morning on the roof with Butterbones the cat, who started out shy and grateful and wound up a howling demanding banshee. Hicham would show up to ask what we’d like for dinner and to suggest a trip or drive us somewhere. Saida the chef, Fadawa the maid and Rabir the houseboy would bustle around making us feel special. We were so safe and spoiled in the riad that we had to remember Robert’s warning to take care outside. The transition was immediate from this island of calm to the souk, a cacophonus labyrinth of narrow steep-walled streets, alleys leading off into mysteries, all thronged with trade.

Since those halcyon hippie days, two generations have grown up in Tourism, and the atmosphere is bracing: yelling hucksters in striped djellabas, bemused tourists in shorts, donkeys pulling carts, guys sharpening knives, beating drums, little old covered ladies begging, and motorbikes, the scourge of the Middle East.

Whole families crowded onto one bike, young guys being important, old men being speedy, power women in full chador and hijab, all blowing exhaust. One must walk single file far to the right in the narrow streets to avoid getting bumped. Then a short passage and wham! Peace:

BURNING HEADS We got there just before Aid al-Adha, or Kurban Bayram in Turkish. This is a Muslim holy day celebrating the Sacrifice of Abraham. Remember, God asked him to kill his son Isaac? As Abraham obediently got ready to cut Isaac’s throat, God relented and let him kill a sheep instead. So once a year, all over the world, sheep and cows and goats all die ritually. The family buys the best animal they can afford, and many hire a professional to do the slaughtering. The meat is shared with the poor.

What this looks like in Marrakech is streets full of doomed sheep, slashed with red paint, in carts, tied in gardens, carried over shoulders. The morning of the day is full of baaing, which gradually dies out as the air fills with the coppery smell of blood. Later that day and the next, every shop is closed and the streets are full of people burning heads and hooves. They’re burned until they are white bone and then used for all sorts of things.

Bone and curly sheep horns show up in furniture, as paperweights, as the design element of the curlicue and in musical instruments, like those shown here with their maker, famous bass guitarist Mustafa. All over the Medina, guys looking through my book recognized him.

After I drew this, I walked into the drawing and discovered that the bottom of those houses built over the streets look like this:

JARDIN MAJORELLE

Created by painter Jacques Majorelle and opened to the public in 1947, the Jardin became derelict after he died. Yves St Laurent and his partner Pierre Berges bought and began restoring these gardens in 1980, and it’s too bad the word “fabulous” is so overused.

One can wander all day in the stands of huge bamboo, cobalt and emerald everywhere, worlds of color, hanging flowering vines over dark and pale pools streaked with red carp. Imagine the parties there! Through the zigzag branches of enormous exotic cacti glow the flat blue, violet and lemon walls of the Berber museum.

Inside, this set of jewelry, a Berber family’s entire wealth in silver, amber and stone, stands glassed and glowing with a dozen others in an infinite starry night. The room is actually tiny, mirrored all around, the low black roof pierced with thousands of pinholes. I stood two hours to draw this, undisturbed by the guards although no photos are allowed, and made many friends.

The Berber are tribal people native to Morocco. They seem well liked by everyone. We saw many of their villages salted throughout the mountains. The highway runs along a river below towering mountaintops. Along the lushly forested river are enchanting restaurants: suspension bridges rock above the water from the highway to the tables below. The color of the land goes from ochre to blood to rose to peach, all overlaid with pale green vegetation and slashed with cobalt blue paint: on tables, pots, tree trunks. We stopped for lunch and played with a raffish orange cat at the edge of a stream. Penny even made it to the top of the waterfall while I elected to stay and draw the Berber Refrigerator: the water hits the whirligig, spins it and sprays onto the cooling bottles of soda.

Most of the structures out in the country are built of taliwaugh– I’m spelling phonetically here– handmade mud bricks. After a few centuries, this rounds and erodes and sinks back into the land.

We saw many women’s collectives along the roads. At one in Marrakech, we had bought Argan oil, famed for its good effect on skin. Now out in the hinterlands were the ragged-leafed Argan trees, native to Morocco, drought-resistant, endangered and protected by Unesco and the nice profits from their oil. Here’s one full of goats.

The awful truth is that Argan oil is extracted from undigested pits harvested from goat shit. Goats climb the trees to eat the fruit. Traditional methods involve boiling, pounding and straining by many well-employed women. I pulled this photo off the Internet, which hastened to inform me that there are nice sterile machines to make Argan oil. Fooey on them, I’ll take the traditional method, and my skin likes it too.

Argan Oil Production, from Wikipedia.

After much driving we came to Ossauria, a coastal which gradually came out of the mists to greet me as I drew. The fort is five hundred years old. I thought the French had built those spherical cornices, but they’re Arab. Hm, could the French have gotten this architectural inspiration from the Arabs? The French were here from WWI until the ‘fifties, when they were booted out. But there remains a vivid French presence: in aesthetics, in language, in voices and faces. Even the King is partly French.

A lot of people didn’t want their pictures drawn, but Fadawa our maid was happy to pose, and very proud of her braces. Women everywhere were smiling through braces which have recently been made affordable.

Leading to the Marrakech Kasbah is an eleventh-century gate covered with fifteen-year-old wooden restoration and topped with storks’ nests occupied all year, for the storks never leave Marrakech. Just as I finished a little girl leaped up on the two cement blocks and posed for a second, long enough to catch her in the drawing. I crossed the street and showed her. I was hoping it would be all right when she reached up, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

TIMTAM HOUSE A doorway in a wall of the souk leads through many passageways to a tea garden of filigree and tile and tall flamelike canna lilies, and beyond to high arched windows, balconies, skylights. This is TimTam House. The owner, Yunus, told me that it was built in the 19th century by the Minister of Justice, and that it was quite plain. Yunus’s grandfather bought it in 1936. The exquisite decoration is all from 1942. While in America they were creating the movie Casablanca, in Marrakech they were creating this.

“My grandfather was more generous with artisans than most, said Yunus, and he got –” he gestured to the high filigree walls. Artisanship like this is rare, now. After his grandmother died, the family converted the house, now subsumed by the Berber Market, to a garden restaurant and carpet shop. Penny and I had spent hours in the garden, enjoying actual face time. Seven years ago she came over and took us along the Mediterranean coast and up to Kapadokya. We don’t see each other often, but when we do, we swing. Here she is on our last afternoon together.

I had a few more days after she left. Back in TimTam, missing her and drawing in the garden, I kept wondering if they would ask me to move to make room for the paying customers, but everybody treated me like Picasso. Passages lead to the center of the house, now a carpet shop, where I spent five hours drawing patterns and talking with Abdul and Jamal. Then I ran into that colossal door, the 19th century original to the house, the Minister of Justice’s door, now leaned up against an interior wall. I spent my last day drawing it, imagining the sun and storms and desperate faces it has seen. Walked home in the dark so happy that I easily avoided a common peril in the souk with its eight-foot-wide streets: being run into by an old man in a djellaba on a motorbike.

As Hicham drove us toward the mountains, I was drawing masses of dawn clouds over the plains when I saw a great shoal of cloud foaming across the horizon. Above it could be seen the tips of the mountains, the Atlas Kabe: High Atlas.These mountains are the reason for the Sahara, as they block the clouds. Snowmelt from them runs down and waters Marrakech, the jewel of the plains.

The rivers are mostly dry this time of year, but the riverbeds are thick with trees. The land is every shade of peach, and the tiles on the houses are green. People came in and out of the mist. The road twisted upwards into the clouds. Rain starred the windshield. We drove along switchback curves, unimaginably high. On one side, the mountainside was barely visible. On the other side, a sheer drop into solid white. Lurching from side to side I fixed my lipstick, in case I met God.

On the highway these have evolved into towns. In one, we drove right up to a kebap place. Hicham squinted through the window at the sheep’s carcass, hung up on display. He grunted and we drove away. “Looks yellow,” he said, “not good.” We breakfasted further along, in a bustling town of steep mountainsides, fruit stands, tractors, tour busses, cardboard over puddles of rain. A tiled room with a balcony over a riverbed, intended as a cool refuge from the heat, but in the rain it was full of steaming people. We had meatballs, and let me tell you, ground beef patties cooked with sliced tomato and red onion will hold you all day.

Hicham had given his water bottle to a kid by the side of the road with car trouble. I kept asking him if he wanted water, and he kept laughing and refusing. “You’re a Bedouin,” I said. “I am,” he said. I had been joking. I knew his mother was Berber, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and red cheeks, he said, from the altitude. But his father was Tuareg. What is Tuareg? “Bedouin,” he said, “they walk the Sahara from end to end, they know no country.”

Many women along the road were wearing robes of purple and lavender and rose. In the infrequent rain nobody carried an umbrella, walking in laughing groups to school. We passed a couple of little kids bundled into bright yellow snowsuits, two women in magenta hijab, many people in Berber blue, a pure cobalt blue, dyed with indigo. The road twisted on up, tiers of highway above us glimpsed through bits of mist. We stopped for pictures next to a few buildings huddled between the road and a sheer drop, staring across space to bare grey mountainsides rising to a jagged ridge high above. Far below was a smear of green: a Berber village. Back in the car, we looped on up toward the summit and at last flashed past a sign on a shuttered shop: ALT 2260 M(eters). Then the mist vanished and the world turned gold as we sailed down the desert side of the mountain. The river widened, and all the green bushes and trees in this world were there. The mountains were rocky moonscapes in dark red, dun, grey.

At the foot of the mountains, after I drew the settlement above, Hicham turned left and drove out through flatlands.

In a small town, he drove up to the mosque and parked. Here is the mosque, he said, gesturing to the rounded minaret, and here is the car, so you can find it. This was Ait-Benhaddou. Beyond is the Wazizih desert and then the Sahara. We walked through the town and came out of a doorway halfway up a hill. I stopped in shock. Across a wide white wash rose a mountain of towers. Spiky-topped towers pitted with rounded windows and doors, ridged with eroded carving, fringed with emerald palm trees, rising there at the edge of the desert. An Oz of sand. Hicham had driven us to the Kasbah.

I spent the next three hours drawing. We crossed the wash on a bridge crowded with tourists. This was disconcerting as I felt I was at the end of the earth, but tourists are why such places survive. Everyone in the Kasbah was either working a guesthouse or selling souvenirs. It seemed appropriate. Kasbah means residence, but thanks to the movies I associate it with a marketplace. Some of the towers are occupied and some are ruins, but you can walk up into them. Climbing up the narrow streets and steep stairs, I looked into a face of delicate beauty, a classic Berber boy’s face, wearing blue and topped with a huge black turban. I’ve seen a face like that on a postcard and wondered where in the world…

I climbed up the rocks above the ancient town and sat looking down into the towers. They looked like huge sand castles. People there said they are 300 years old. Nuts, said Hicham, a lot older. I drew until it was time to leave. Walking down through the towers I found them rounded like caves inside.

Ait-Benhaddou on a Postcard

At the edge of the wash, some Tuareg guys were hustling dune buggy rides to the Sahara. They wore traditional pale blue robes and big black turbans, and their dune buggies were the sort where the wheels look like coke cans turned on the side. I realized I was walking in the actual desert. The white sand was silky, fine, clean, softer than California beach sand. I did not want to wash off my sandals.

The ride back was quieter as I was drunk on the day.

Berber Village on a Postcard

Long loops of road through the golden afternoon, then silence and grey as we zoomed into the cloud. As we hurtled up, above us shone a spectral image: silhouettes of moving cars glowing through the fog as if across a lit street between dark buildings. It was a shaft of light up on the summit. It took less time to return as we had used up every camera device in the car. All through the long drive back through the gathering dark I couldn’t speak a word, but I was smiling, because at long last I have been to the Kasbah.

DRAWING ON ISTANBUL 2 is NOW AVAILABLE! through Amazon.com, any minute.

HERE IN ISTANBUL: In Sultanahmet, at Jennifer’s Hamam in the Arasta Bazaar. Elsewhere, ask at your local bookstore. DOI2 is available through Citlembik Publishing. You can buy a signed copy from me personally at any of these upcoming events:

DECEMBER 1 (Sunday) 4:30 PM at MOLLY’S CAFE on the European Side in Galata at Sahkulu Sokak No 12, 90 212 245 1696. Directions: head down from Tunel on Galip Dede. Take the second right past the Dervish Monastery and continue on down to No. 12.

DECEMBER 5 (Thursday) Official Launch Party at KALAMAR RESTAURANT in KUMKAPI, 7:30 PM. Caparis Sk. No: 15, Kumkapi. 90 212 517 1849. http://www.kalamar.com.tr. From the Shore Road (Sahil Yolu or Kennedy Cad), turn in at the Kumkapi Gate on the Marmara Sea. By tram, go toward Bagcilar, get off in Beyazit and walk straight down the hill on Tiyatro Caddesi to the famous row of fish restaurants at the bottom. PLEASE COME!!!